SPEAKER_00: hey everybody hey everybody jack after dark is back he's being candid about twitter's board

SPEAKER_01: dysfunction uh the takeover bed and uh we do a little dreaming molly and i about what companies would we like to do a hostile takeover for i know i'm gonna be i'm gonna keep coming with answers

Jason Calacanis: on this all week long because now i just can't stop thinking about it um i'm window shopping if you will for a public company of my very own we're also going to talk about facebook's internet infrastructure development projects in africa because facebook just continues with its controversial attempts to figure out how to get everyone on the internet through facebook yes it's

SPEAKER_00: not scary or dystopian at all no you can trust them and better.com did another round of layoffs but maybe they're getting a little bit better at how to do these mass layoffs remotely and if you

Jason Calacanis: are a ceo staring down a downturn consider these do's and don'ts big time we also wrap up with an ev startup that's making a regional seaplane it is an interesting potentially inspiring startup of

SPEAKER_08: the day yeah it's a really clever idea flies like 50 feet above the ground what could go wrong so it's

SPEAKER_13: going to be a great show stick with us this week in startups is brought to you by vanta compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast twist listeners can get one thousand dollars off for a limited time at vanta dot com slash twist and broker and brokers startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle save up to 20 off of traditional insurance today at in broker dot com slash twist while you're there get an extra 10 off using offer code twist and rocket to hire in today's competitive market you need outstanding recruiting rockets expert recruiters paired with ml candidate matching set them apart from the rest get 20 off your first placement at get rocket dot com slash twist hey everybody welcome to this week in startups how you doing molly

SPEAKER_10: it's tuesday it's tuesday doing great just let me guess what's on the live in the dream live in the

Jason Calacanis: dream hmm i wonder if we could talk about like i don't know social media moderation and maybe some crypto stuff and like if we accidentally stray into war then it'll be yeah trifecta it'll be the 20

SPEAKER_29: trifecta the 22 trifecta whoa groundhog day so uh jack dorsey is back uh i call him jack after dark

SPEAKER_31: there was some moment in which jack decided he'd start using twitter uh i think it was like year 12

SPEAKER_33: of the service he decided concept you know i i kind of been studying i think i'm ready to start using this i think i'm gonna take it out of beta and he just started saying wild stuff like wild great

SPEAKER_35: awesome candid stuff i don't know what's causing this candor i think he's just had enough of the

SPEAKER_36: bull and he he's been doing it again uh ever since you ever since he left as twitter ceo he's been doing a lot more tweeting and then since elon put in a bid or started buying up some shares

SPEAKER_40: uh jack after dark's back mm-hmm look maybe you can recap what we got i was gonna say let me uh let

Jason Calacanis: me run us through a little bit of the drama so the saga started on the weekend april 16th friend of the pod gary tan tweeted the following the wrong partner on your board can literally make a billion dollars in value evaporate it's not the sole reason behind every startup failure but it is the true story a surprising percentage of the time so interesting um we've seen some of that play out in our various tv shows that we're watching based on real events to which twitter user uh tren griffin

SPEAKER_20: who is an investor super smart friend girlies they just had dinner together i think oh i saw on the

SPEAKER_43: social media okay i'm like oh you're trying to use so he writes essays he writes essays he's smart

SPEAKER_44: essays well so what he then he replied on twitter and not an essay but tweeting i think to one and said

Jason Calacanis: from uh quoting a guy named fred deston saying what i do know for sure is that this old silicon valley proverb is grounded in age-old wisdom that still applies today good boards don't create good companies but a bad board will kill a company every time so that's like a really interesting back and forth and then jack replied to trend griffin with two words and those words were big facts big facts

SPEAKER_39: um yeah what yeah so i mean the the last board uh he had to suffer through was you know twitter's got a

SPEAKER_29: long history of um you know the founders battling it out for who's in charge you've got three ceos at different points evan de costello and jack uh and yeah a lot a lot of drama back in the day perhaps a

SPEAKER_52: very big board um with a lot of medium-sized owners right so it was complicated so then it

Jason Calacanis: yeah and so then this went on and said what unfolded was an amazing sequence of tweets uh the user i had drama replied to jack if you and the we'll just we'll just read this back and forth because it's fascinating and said yeah if you look into the history of twitter board it's intriguing i was a witness uh on its early beginnings mired in plots and coups and particularly amongst twitter's founding members i wish it could be made into a hollywood thriller one day and then jack replied it's consistently been the dysfunction of the company causing user uh yeet useless thinking to respond are you allowed to say this and then jack to write back no classic jack after dark that's jack after dark it's

SPEAKER_59: kind of like the moon knight like he just comes out he just comes out he's give me control give me

SPEAKER_62: control of the body control jack scott wapner of cnbc give me the account jack exactly give me the

SPEAKER_66: password someone's on twitter and the password i mean then then you know the the daylight jack wakes up and people are like whoa you okay buddy you're right what do you mean he wakes up like

Jason Calacanis: your tweets last night he's like i don't know what happened last night i didn't do this then uh reporters get in the game here scott wapner from cnbc serious question for jack if you think the twitter board is or was so dysfunctional and kept the company from being great as you imply either through your own tweets or replies to others why didn't you do anything about it when you ran the company for several years and jack responded so much to say but nothing that can be said mm-hmm and then uh vinnie lingam jumps in with the translation just simply saying that as a public

SPEAKER_75: company with a bunch of self-serving board members he did not have the power or authority to make the changes he needed to because of the short-term impact to the revenue and growth numbers which they

SPEAKER_76: deemed unacceptable i think that's probably accurate they had jack on a very short leash they wanted to

SPEAKER_29: see quarter over quarter growth uh year over year growth and they create had the cardinal sin they

SPEAKER_36: made the cardinal sin of uh when you're the distant number two to a juggernaut um saying you have to

SPEAKER_52: play according to their success metric for example google all of a sudden started dominating yahoo and then yahoo kept trying to be google and that was not what yahoo strength was yahoo strength was they had these content verticals they had you know other services like games things that google wasn't into um sports videos all that stuff they should have just been yahoo which should have been a combination of

SPEAKER_82: you know some search sure but right you know culture articles content video sports mail those

SPEAKER_85: great verticals that did incredibly well for them yeah uh where people and today's day you know

SPEAKER_52: if you want to reach finance people as terrible as finance.yahoo.com is there's a bunch of people who use it as their default stock ticker and then you go to the page and you look at the content i was talking to the people who are running it now and i was like like why should we should put this

SPEAKER_29: week in startups up on finance.yahoo.com and clip us and put us up there like you've got no content there what are you doing um and i was like it really is gnarly up there if you look at the content

SPEAKER_52: it's all they sold all the stories so you go to your finance.yahoo.com i basically learned that if i click anything below my stock ticker chances are it's going to be a paid

SPEAKER_86: you know marketing or ads it kind of ruined it uh but yes this is um well so let's look at

SPEAKER_89: let's let's play a what do you think was happening because it is very clear that there have been power

Jason Calacanis: struggles at twitter i mean you point out just at the ceo level alone the founder and ceo level power struggles struggles galore jack seems to be uh saying pretty clearly that the board was also uh messing with them all the time let's like look at the the twitter board members and see if we can figure out who might have been right because you do have this sort of fundamental question like did the board interference stall twitter and that's why it never developed more products or was the leadership saying like no no we just want it to be this really simple thing like craigslist all along on the board you had jack dorsey parag agrawal the current ceo brett taylor the co-ceo

SPEAKER_40: i think these are the current board members right this is the current board of twitter yeah and i

SPEAKER_90: don't know let's let's see producers um who i don't know how much turnover there's been as an

SPEAKER_40: example but i think everybody else probably was on when jack was on probably okay so brett

Jason Calacanis: taylor co-ceo of salesforce yeah probably knows what he's doing a little bit mimi alamehu uh senior vp for public private partnerships at mastercard egon durbin of silver lake that's a newer one i think probably since that big stake martha lane fox lucky voice group omid kourastani uh former executive chairman of twitter dr feifei lee from stanford the former cefo of google the ceo of first dibs.com and then uh the former chairman of the board of directors of alliance bernstein holding

SPEAKER_97: okay who is the troublemaker here well yeah got a lot of googlers on there yeah i i don't know that

SPEAKER_99: right like i don't know why yeah this doesn't speak to me as an activist board yeah i i think there were

SPEAKER_36: probably two iterations of the board there was the venture board that fred wilson was on and dick costello and like that era evan williams where they were changing ceos and who was going to run it jack or ev or dick right and then what were they running it for because i think dick costello came in to add a business model i think jack was always a product person and evan was always like super considered somewhere between the two uh and so yeah i i think it's just been a dysfunctional board in terms of who got to run the company who is in charge and like people wanting to switch who

SPEAKER_52: was the ceo and it's because also this company didn't have like a a tight uh group of founders between ev biz and jack like um all in sync of who was going to run it so right i mean it sort of seems

Jason Calacanis: to me like none of these sort of ceo kings right there was like this it's like you had this battle between the heirs to figure out who was going to be ceo but it seems that maybe none of them had a strong enough vision or put enough a strong enough stamp or business model on it to keep everybody from meddling what this says to me is that there was just always a power vacuum and so the board came

SPEAKER_104: in and was like trying to meddle because if you're killing it don't board stay out of it uh generally

SPEAKER_36: you would want to get out of the way yeah and then if you're trying to um do a reclamation project or you're trying to do a reboot or a pivot or whatever you know reorganization that's like something that will take place over six to twelve quarters like you would have to make a plan for a year or two or

SPEAKER_52: three and so this two or three year plan was i think the challenge is i don't think anybody really ever got to execute against a plan or and none of those plans did in fact work to grow the

SPEAKER_36: service so i think dick had a good reign coming in and getting monetization and scaling up the organization and make it public company ready jack i don't think ever got a clear vision executed

SPEAKER_52: against it he wanted to do the open source algorithms i think he wanted to open the api up he wanted to do some bold things but maybe the board um vetoed him is what i'm getting the sense of so maybe he felt like he couldn't take drastic steps because drastic steps might mean as we talked about last week if you want to solve the bot problem you're going to take a hit on the daily active

SPEAKER_86: user right right you know you want to get rid of trolling you want to have more real names you're going to be putting friction into the system so do you want to have friction uh or do you want to have

SPEAKER_52: activity you know do you want to slow things down increase the quality have friction or do you want to have more activity and growth yeah and sometimes it's bad growth you know it's like not sustainable growth the more toxic people you allow on the platform the more bots you allow on the platform

SPEAKER_92: the easier it is to start a burner account well the worse somebody's experience is going to get so

SPEAKER_112: listen when you're a founder it's fun to trade your craziest stories with other founders recently balloon ceo amanda greenberg one of my portfolio companies told me how vanta's sock two solution helped her save an important deal in the final hours yes balloon sells sas products and collaborative software and when they needed 10 documents in place within 48 hours to close a deal well vanta saved the day by supplying customizable templates for amanda to fill out and helping them through the process all the way to close so if you don't have your sock too tight you can't close major customers like this vanta's compliance software makes it easier to get and renew your sock too they continually test against technical and non-technical sock two requirements they partner with over two dozen audit firms who have been trained to file sock two reports directly within vanta and on average vanta customers are sock two compliant in just two to four weeks compare that to three to five months without them and guess what vanta is going to give you a thousand dollars off right now for your sock too because you listen to this week in startups get that thousand dollars off

SPEAKER_115: right now vanta dot com slash twist v-a-n-t-a dot com slash twist once again vanta dot com slash twist for

Jason Calacanis: a thousand dollars off i guess do we have a sense do we know historically whether like that was something that jack really wanted to do is clean up the bot problem i think he was uh very much into opening up

SPEAKER_52: the api again uh and then opening uh doing this uh bring your own algorithm kind of thing um and letting

SPEAKER_36: that happen i think he also had some crypto ambitions i do also think there was probably a a beginning of a conflict between the two companies square and and twitter that was challenging because square is doing crypto twitter's got crypto ambitions they did that nft thing very quickly i think that was probably under jack like hey i mean what if this nft thing takes off

SPEAKER_52: we could be trading nfts we could be the place that people showcase their nfts and that's largely become true i believe people if you want to show off your nft the best place to do it i think is twitter your twitter profile yeah i mean it's kind of a i mean genius idea when you think about it um and if they had their own cryptocurrency inside of twitter uh i'm not saying like this is the best vision but it's a vision and if your twitter handle became your wallet like that's kind of dope and you could store

SPEAKER_40: stuff in it kind of dope so yeah uh it's i sort of feel i mean i feel like it's very interesting to

Jason Calacanis: watch this back and forth it seems quite clear that it's true that your board can come in and break stuff for you uh not for you can come in and break stuff and also i would say i'm not a hundred percent prepared to take jack's word unquestioningly here because he was also he was running two different companies he was pretty checked out he was like i'm gonna go to africa for six months i'm into this blockchain thing like there was evident i would say if i were a board member i would also probably be like who's running the store here like are you focused enough on this product or are you trying to turn it into this other product and you know do you have a real plan here like i sort of feel like a board doesn't come in trying to bigfoot a plan if there's not one already no but they could

SPEAKER_36: just say you know you got some fractured board these six p these five people want to go for growth you know and these six or seven people want to go for safety you know that's probably where you know there's probably opposing forces in how open the platform should be in terms of the api uh and allowing other people to monetize that a strict focus on making money and then you know radical plans for the product with regard to safety or new products maybe acquisitions these things could all

SPEAKER_39: become uh very controversial maybe jack wanted to buy something you know that would have been extremely complimentary they had a really good run of buying stuff periscope and vine what could have been i think like their instagram and whatsapp they should i mean we wouldn't have

Jason Calacanis: tick tock right now if they had kept on with vine um they could have metering you bob g asked and i think we've sort of alluded to this too would twitter be different if jacket had the same share as market as mark zuckerberg does in facebook and that yeah is a really really good example of like now you have zuckerberg being like hey i'm taking my giant social network and i'm turning it into a vr and ar company i'm just doing a massive so if jack had wanted to do a pivot like that and had this super majority voting situation like no problem we're founder authority and you know we always

SPEAKER_36: debate like oh my god you can't build anything in san francisco uh you can't build anything in brooklyn it's like i think when you're saying like that scale building project and you're comparing it to china being able to build it i think you're talking about you can't kick 50 people out of their

SPEAKER_52: homes raise them and then put a stadium on top of them without them having a process to fight you

SPEAKER_85: right and it's like oh you mean democracy like people have rights uh so you know it's you you if

SPEAKER_52: you give up a bunch of rights people can make unilateral decisions and unilateral decisions can have big

SPEAKER_133: outcomes and great outcomes the lesson here is democracy doesn't work at all in companies

SPEAKER_89: you know i'm totally joking by the way i i am not democracy but democracies create chaos and certainly at a company you can't have no you cannot have like a democracy will slow you down it's a

SPEAKER_135: messy democracies are a messy slow process yes and that's the strength of it right like you can't

SPEAKER_36: you can't change how many uh terms the president can do very easily here in the united states that

SPEAKER_136: would be a messy decade-long project probably we're seeing that play out right now yes so like

SPEAKER_140: certain things are hard to change and in a company we have a god king it's like yeah we're going to

SPEAKER_112: build a parallel company over here and all the profits from company a are going to fund company b

SPEAKER_141: the end you know i mean what is so yes let's vote yeah you're in i'm in great i'm in i mean that's all

Jason Calacanis: that matters super what is so fascinating actually is that i've made this analogy more than once on the show which is that twitter because you know no one is so evidently in charge operates a little bit like a dow and here is jack saying like oh i want this decentralization and i want to pop up all these dows and then we keep seeing these scams where basically somebody comes in takes over a voting majority in a dow and then tanks it or steals all the money and so i'm sort of wondering if jack maybe

SPEAKER_143: isn't taking the wrong lesson away from this what company do you most want to run a hostile takeover

SPEAKER_144: for i know uh look at you you start me sir ah yeah if you could take over let's see i mean you can't

SPEAKER_59: take over apple but uh if i can take over and just sleep on your bed of money hell yeah no i would just go and i would be like i would take the brand extension to absurd levels i would do adam newman as ceo

SPEAKER_150: of apple no no no no no no no babushka listen we rivka fly rivka we fly we fly we've got up by

SPEAKER_153: the airline by united so i would literally come in if i was tim cook i'd be like go buy united airlines yeah and then i would turn it into apple airlines and i would double the prices and i would change the seats and make them apple seats then i'd be like okay what next what else do people do every day okay great buy me mcdonald's great and now it's gonna be apples fast food thing

SPEAKER_147: or buy me whatever salad thing i would make apple brand everywhere everything can you imagine what

Jason Calacanis: you could do with apple if you did have a zuckerberg or even a jack mentality of just like we are not going to be safe we're not going to just like live and die by the iphone e-bikes oh my god apple e-bikes

SPEAKER_157: yes great go right in the store bye bye bye bye here's a bunch of e-bikes can you imagine you

SPEAKER_159: buy apple e-bike it'd be amazing i would ride the crap out of an apple e-bike find my e-bike uh but

SPEAKER_33: they you know they're they're kind of like to do one thing every 10 years and make it spectacular and then sell a billion i mean i understand the strategy i would just go i would pursue a different one

SPEAKER_29: all right there's innovators so you also take over apple and then just take over unlimited brand

SPEAKER_162: extensions what do you let's see it's got to be tech right it's going to be a tech company it's

SPEAKER_164: not going to be like it's not going to be like it could be disney it could be any company pick a

SPEAKER_33: company any company uh hostile takeover and then what do you do next peloton you like the peloton

SPEAKER_40: that would be interesting one that's actually a realistic one fill my house with pelotons yeah

SPEAKER_162: that would be a delight ah i mean because you can obviously like it's pretty tempting to be like

SPEAKER_44: i would take over one of the oil giants one of the oil and gas giants and just be like okay we're doing

SPEAKER_05: it we're doing renewable energy here we go yeah well you have to sell oil to fund it you'd have to sell oil to fund it you have to do a transition plan yeah exactly you have a transition plan like the

Jason Calacanis: saudis are doing or like the activist shareholders are doing but it's not but to be honest like that's not as fun but i do think that those big oil companies have like employees with skills that we need to like you know pump ice onto glaciers to refreeze them or pump water and like i mean you could redeploy

SPEAKER_162: those resources so effectively after you actually like kickstarted the transition and made sure it was

Jason Calacanis: real walmart and just changed the packaging but right like what if you buy somebody i think earlier one of the notice said buy amazon and then spin off aws jay said who said that which would be super fun or buy google like if you do a hostile takeover of google and then just be like okay let's get real here

SPEAKER_177: about what are you doing in hardware just like google pick six things and then do them and then

SPEAKER_104: stop introducing stuff that you just like you know bail on yeah they're they're they like to dabble the google guys like to dabble right but it means you can't i don't buy any of their stuff now because

SPEAKER_112: i'm like i don't trust you they should dabble and spin out dabble and spin out it would have been

SPEAKER_52: great if they just spun google fiber out into its own company you know yeah it would have been dope

SPEAKER_115: i'm going to quickly explain one crucial type of insurance that all startups need it's dno insurance you've heard of this before you might not know what it is this is directors and officers insurance and it helps if somebody does something dumb and you get sued i don't know how to tell you more plainly or maybe you didn't do something dumb and some dumb person decides to sue you for a dumb reason i have seen this i've seen all flavors of it you need to have dno it's just part of growing up as a startup and becoming a real formidable business and if you don't have business insurance but you're going to have failed one of the first steps of being a founder the best place to look for it is in broker and brokers technology is going to save you time it's going to save you money prices are up to 20 lower and you get better coverage than the incumbents you can go from sign up to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes when you work with in broker instead of all those slow incumbents you're not dealing with those giant lumbering large companies sign up takes days not weeks and the process is transparent there is no opaque pricing so to instantly buy custom built insurance for startups go to in broker.com twist while you're there you're going to get an extra 10 off by using the code twist easy to remember this week in startups t-w-i-s-t go to in broker e-m-b-r-o-k-e-r.com slash twist and use that offer code twist speaking of uh google fiber uh it seems like meta has been

SPEAKER_185: quietly uh working on their access program in africa what do we got here molly so uh you may remember

Jason Calacanis: that several years ago around about like 2016 ish facebook tried to roll out this program called free basics and what it would do is be free internet access for people in developing countries in africa and parts of asia um including india and it was like you get these free basics and facebook and we get all your data and all these developing company countries but especially india was like nope absolutely not this is a massive violation of net neutrality for you to come in here and like give us free internet access but choose all of the things that we get to see absolutely not um and so

SPEAKER_40: facebook was that part of it they were going to like control what you saw on it or yeah they would hand pick the sites that were available via free basics so it would be like you know some health websites some education things facebook how can people be so clueless as to like think that

SPEAKER_135: poor people in an emerging market would not understand they're being played like if you're poor and somebody's trying to play you you know immediately yeah because you've seen this movie before people coming in trying to prey on people who have less resources than them absolutely i mean

Jason Calacanis: it's like literally what is the difference in this case between facebook and like a gold mining company right you know like come on like this is resource extraction yep and it's super painfully obvious so facebook backed away from that supposedly and so then what they pivoted to instead is okay well instead of providing an app we'll just go ahead and literally lay the fiber got it we will provide the entire infrastructure so in 2019 meta partnered with main one a company that lays fiber optic cables across west africa to improve the poor internet access in the southern nigerian state of edo specifically 250 miles of cable have been installed meta's investment came out to about 20 million and the investment has as you can imagine meta would tout help train 2 000 teachers across four schools uh and you know try to get people you know online which is great sure emmanuel eweka a previous senior edo government official says quote i'd say facebook actually loses in terms of making money out of those cables but then they gain it back in the user data that they will generate and obviously that has huge potential in a country like nigeria this is facebook attempting to do the same thing but all the way down to the pipes and i should point out here that google has been trying to do very similar things like i have a friend who is deeply deeply freaked out about the fact that the global internet infrastructure that's being laid and created right now is being created by private companies who sell your data i'm sorry facebook will come for me over that monetize your data yeah yeah and that there that's

Chamath Palihapitiya: something to pay a lot of attention to and some of these i think it is a situation where

SPEAKER_36: some places are just never going to get high speed so i think some of the internet giants are like

SPEAKER_85: doesn't matter who gets it there if we can get some internet there we have more customers there so it's just a way to online another set of uh customers and i guess the devil's in the details for all of

SPEAKER_36: these but it does make you wonder what's going on also i think this is all moot i think a lot of this stuff is historical projects because amazon is doing their low earth orbit satellites they just

SPEAKER_52: announced they're going to be you know deploying hundreds of them just like starlink has

SPEAKER_36: and so the there are going to be i think four major low earth orbit constellations going on so you're

SPEAKER_52: going to have four people with two three four or five thousand of these up there there's going to be 20 30 40 000 satellites up there seems like a lot but if i told you you have to put 40 000 satellite imagine like the earth being even bigger you know greater circumference than it is now and then you had to put 40 000 backpacks or you know luggage rollers around the planet like you would never find one of them if you walk the planet for 10 lifetimes right there's really actually not that many out

SPEAKER_86: there it seems like a lot but it's dispersed over a very large field and so this is all going to be uh an incredible brave new world because all this fiber is great but for a lot of applications the satellite's going to do a good enough job uh and it's going to be uh yeah but then kepler's coming

SPEAKER_181: you end up in sort of the same situation right which is you've got private companies in control of internet infrastructure whether it comes from space or on the ground facebook and google i looked this up in the interim facebook and google have been investing in giant undersea cables that connect the us singapore and indonesia yeah they're you know they're taking over where at and bt and these

Jason Calacanis: telco-led global consortiums left off in terms of building internet infrastructure so you know i guess the question is sort of like what does the global regulatory framework look like for this and are we okay with i mean but it's but in some ways it's not that dissimilar from the great thing is the

SPEAKER_52: internet is uh a distributed the original distributed application so nobody can own any one part of it and if you were to try to exert control over it you'd lose it because people would just find another way to route around you you might not be as fast it might be slower but with with these satellites going up and having four different players doing that in addition to everything that's been laid

SPEAKER_135: right in addition to 5g so now 5g yeah exactly don't count how the town goes there i understand in new york i saw somebody was testing in new york like getting six seven hundred uh megabit on their

SPEAKER_52: phones and laptops with this like 5g i forgot which band it is but you know the highest bands are now starting to be deployed and i was just talking to a friend of my new york and they're like yeah i'm

SPEAKER_135: gonna cut the cable and just get verizon internet and i'm like what do you mean they're like yeah just put this thing in your window and your whole home is your like lt connection and there it is actually that was the story i was reading of just like this uh bandwidth tests uh the c band i guess they call

SPEAKER_86: it is blowing people's minds in uh new york so and to the people asking in the chat like yes the

Jason Calacanis: current internet cables were laid originally by private companies but they're private companies that have fcc regulation right there there there is regulation and a lot of public money went into subsidizing those and as a result they have things like peering agreements that require them by law to like share that access with other companies um and so the question is like if facebook and google put down a big undersea cable do they have to let anybody piggyback on that ever no yeah that's

SPEAKER_140: a good well they probably are going to want to have reciprocal arrangements with other people so if

SPEAKER_135: their cable went down their traffic go over that so there is that yeah there is that but it's interesting

SPEAKER_162: that and it's fascinating that you know these companies just keep trying right it's just like

Jason Calacanis: putting laptops it's like how apple made the laptops cheap and google made the chromebooks cheap you want to get the kids when they're kids is how they're thinking about these companies of like the opportunity of the next what is it two or three billion to come online i mean it it's going to

SPEAKER_52: be everybody and so we're we're finding the pockets of people that you know the the pockets of resistance

SPEAKER_92: to high speed for whatever dysfunctional reason it could be the economies it could be the government

SPEAKER_223: that's really a dysfunctional reason it's just timing right it's just there well i mean sometimes it's

SPEAKER_52: like something doesn't want to let in you know oh sure you know some internet or wants to control it and you know like i think cuba was another one where like they the phones people were still paying by the minute and it was like incredibly expensive and it's like all these other countries wanted to come in and compete for that business and they're like yeah no no this is controlled by

SPEAKER_115: the state uh you don't get to participate hiring well is one of the most important things a startup can do to increase their chances of having outlier success so if your current hiring strategies aren't working well rocket can help you rocket is trusted by companies like tinder nerd wallet and carta because it was started by former tech founders who understand how to hire at scale rocket was built by founders for founders and they use machine learning to supercharge their team of 60 recruiters to help you close hires quickly and at a high quality level they'll help you hire from freelance to executives and this is a white glove service folks they're going to save you time they're going to help you meet better candidates and they're going to lower the number of hiring mistakes rocket is currently helping a well-funded early-stage api company called rudder r-u-t-t-e-r and they're helping them hire across engineering product marketing and sales and it's going great rudder's founder had this to say couldn't recommend a better early stage recruiting partner to work with here's your call to action get rocket.com twist and use the promo code twist for 20 off your first placement zero dollars required up front so there's no risk that's get rocket.com twist and remember

SPEAKER_86: to use the promo code twist to save 20 off all right listen yeah the layoffs continue and they will

SPEAKER_00: continue until morale gets boosted until people turn around their bad attitudes when they keep laying

SPEAKER_230: people off better.com started yet another round of layoffs i i can't tell if they're just practicing

SPEAKER_31: how many people work at this company like are they do they keep adding a thousand people so that they can lay people off every six months is that like a strategic objective here it's like practice

SPEAKER_43: they really seem to uh it's like a it's like a groundhog day situation over there they started another round of layoffs is their third in five months i can't believe how many people work at this company but you remember i'm wondering about that too uh in uh december the ceo vishal uh vichelle guard g-a-r-g laid off 900 employees which is about nine percent of the company uh over zoom in a very like cavalier weird passive aggressive not gracious way it was just deranged um and uh here i reacted to it

SPEAKER_86: uh i guess on the pod pretty viscerally episode 1341 60 seconds we are laying off about 15 percent the market efficiency and performances and productivity if you're on this call you are part of the unlucky group you dude that is being laid off your employment here is terminated effective immediately are you kidding me what does this mean for what's next you're going to get an email from hr askhr at better.com to your personal email address regarding details of your severance and your benefits for all us employees we're providing four weeks of severance one month of full benefits and

SPEAKER_249: two months of cobra for which we will pay the premium so three months total benefits if you

SPEAKER_248: elect for cobra you do this you would do this in smaller groups you would do this in a more humane way you would give people the ability to opt into it so the pain was lessened you would take responsibility none of that's happening here and you also have this very bizarre effective immediately

SPEAKER_250: you're terminated effective immediately you don't have to speak to people that way

SPEAKER_104: yeah so anyway that was my my notes to that uh i don't think i'd you know what this is shocking but

Jason Calacanis: i had not seen that video like i am astonished i had read the you know summaries of it by the way uh for those who were listening that was filmed by an employee who was being laid off of this so the cursing that you heard there which i first thought was jason molly was not me and was not jason yes that

SPEAKER_07: was the person being laid off yes um who was you know gracious enough to videotape it and put it on

SPEAKER_36: snapchat uh so anyway that was the initial one then he wound up getting suspended or fired it was a whole back and forth of how bad this was so in march they laid off another 300 another 3100 employees

SPEAKER_136: so that's 40 percent of the company from its uh december peak he's back by the way he did not get

SPEAKER_11: fired i want to be really clear on that in terms of boards meddling some boards metal but some boards apparently do not because he had a 30-day suspension was a suspension that's so weird and then fired

SPEAKER_261: 3100 people and a bunch of them found out what do you think he did did he ski 40 days during that 30

SPEAKER_264: day suspension i think he skied 40 days didn't he he took his plane backwards in time and

Jason Calacanis: and ski 40 days they didn't even call it a suspension says justin oh my god so yes the board was not that concerned about that they apparently were like no problem so then they laid off 3100 employees and a bunch of those employees found out when they got a severance check in their payroll accounts not by being told uh directly by their employers that they were being laid off and i think they also leaked it so back to the present as you know practice practice practice wow tuesday uh today is the day we're recording this at 8am better.com chief people officer sent an email to all employees impacted by the layoffs in the email he mentioned that the affected employees would receive a one-on-one

SPEAKER_39: phone call from quote leaders yes that's what i said to do after watching this i know it's like we were in the um pandemic and now it's over i guess um you can fly on planes without masks that

SPEAKER_97: was a really interesting video to watch what a day yesterday it was a weird day by the way it's just

SPEAKER_159: 30 seconds ago you take your mask off so yolo and then everything the plane takes the restaurant i was like oh god it's weird the withdrawal from the pandemic is 16 of people without covet just got

SPEAKER_29: it because everybody started yelling yeah exactly well no it's it's pretty clear when you're talking the vapors come out i think we that was one thing we learned about these things and keep the spit in

SPEAKER_39: dum-dums well people not talking on planes is like the saving grace of why like it didn't seem like planes became petri dishes or that was one theory i guess the ventilation system anyway anyway long

SPEAKER_112: story short doing it one-on-one is the way to go if you're going to do it you could just let people know the company's reorganizing over the next 30 days each group is going to meet with our managers

SPEAKER_52: and we're going to resize there's a chance you could be laid off there's a chance we would want you to continue there's a chance you get to choose we'll have an option but we have to right size the company if you are looking at other opportunities you can call hr at any time but each group

SPEAKER_86: will be i'd be doing this in real time sadly this isn't there's no other choice of how to do this and since you're not in office it's going to seem perhaps impersonal we're going to try to work against that by having one-on-ones with each person who's affected and really trying to make sure you have the softest landing possible and that we do whatever we can to help you find another great opportunity and we appreciate obviously everything you did it's 100 on management

SPEAKER_92: we didn't get here um it's not nothing to do with you this is 100 our fault exactly so you see the way

SPEAKER_86: i just said it like it's like just be a human and be normal and i think that's the problem is some

Jason Calacanis: people are deranged fools like this guy they are well and you know i mean i guess the question is whether he's a founder and to what extent you like this is really relevant to every company in every portfolio right now because we may be we're entering a right sizing period this is not the last time a company is going to find itself having to do layoffs because it's you know too too bloated because it was trying to blitz scale let's say right and that there is a playbook for how this is done and in the process of building your company you sort of have to plan for everything and you have to plan for this possibility and in fact i think some of our curriculum in founders university and in the accelerator includes some basic preparation for these conversations yeah there's a way to do it you should

SPEAKER_52: always have a plan a and a plan b like this is if we really crush it and then this is usually when you

SPEAKER_36: build a plan you have like scenarios so this is one scenario we exceed the expectations we hit the expectations and we're below expectations 20 more 20 less and on target so you can kind of build those models and hey if we underperform here's when we run out of money 14 months if we do it on plan we

SPEAKER_52: run out of money in 19 months and if we over perform we actually hit break even in month you know 21 so we'll be just fine and we'll be default alive and that's your job as the ceo and the management

SPEAKER_36: team is actually have those scenarios and be prepared for them yeah and if the market changes like it just did well you can say you know what we had those three scenarios let's build a fourth scenario we're unable to raise money and put more fuel in the tank we're unable to raise a bridge

SPEAKER_135: and we have to hit we have no choice but to get to profitability on the money we have

SPEAKER_00: in other words no funding available no funding secured plan they extend the runway plan the like

Jason Calacanis: tighten up like you guys were talking about on all in right if you see the winds changing you make preparations for that and it doesn't mean that you i don't think that as a founder it means you don't sufficiently believe right it doesn't mean you're not you're failing to manifest your vision to make a plan for multiple situations because you don't know what you're going to encounter it doesn't mean you're like not having a big dream if you prepare for the possibility that your big dream

SPEAKER_222: might need some editing along the way here's the thing when you raise venture capital what you're

SPEAKER_00: doing is you're saying we're going to staff this company for what it's going to look like 12 months from now or 18 months from now we're going to spend money as if we have um 3 million dollars a year in

SPEAKER_52: revenue so we're going to have eventually we'll have 2.6 we'll have 2.2 million in costs to make 3 million dollars and we'll have this 25 margin or so that's basically what our business will look

SPEAKER_00: like so we're going to go right to 2.2 million in spend now even though we don't have 3 million in revenue we have 300 000 and then we're going to use that advantage to get to the 3 million in revenue

SPEAKER_86: marker faster so we'll have extra sales people we'll have extra support people we'll build a customer support group as if we have you know 3 million dollars worth of customers if they each pay a hundred thousand dollars we have 30 of these if they each pay ten thousand we have 300 of them so

SPEAKER_140: we have three hundred ten thousand dollar customers we need to have this size support

SPEAKER_86: organization okay build it now let's get it dialed in okay it's not efficient what we're trying to do is use funding to get to the milestone quicker now what happens if you're really like going for it you

SPEAKER_52: know you're trying to get to the revenue number you would organically get to in three years so you're spending like a company that maybe would have three years of bootstrapping mm-hmm well i mean you may not be able to get there you may not be able to get there at that accelerated pace and yeah a market that has headwinds so you just have to adjust and this is a company that obviously was like fast just

SPEAKER_135: going too fast yeah and so fast was spending money right if they were spending 100 million a year and they were making 600 000 like i mean that is 200 x off 150 to 200 x like they would have to 150 x revenue that's a lot that's a lot of that's a lot of doubles you know you'd have to

SPEAKER_33: double the revenue like a lot of times yeah 1.2 2.5 5 10 20 40 80 mm-hmm that's seven times you'd have to double you have to do seven doubles as the fast team to get to break even that's how crazy

SPEAKER_112: their spending was a little too much a little too much obviously yeah so we're going to see more of

SPEAKER_36: this the other thing is you got to be very careful that you have the ability when you lay people off and

SPEAKER_52: you're giving them three months severance now you got another trap okay in order to get these people off the books we're going to need to spend a bunch of money right to offload them layoffs are expensive

Jason Calacanis: so also it argues against bloat too i mean the bloat thing is really real like the fact that they're laying off this many people at better.com makes us question i think somebody said they had 10 000 employees i'm not an advocate for working people to death but like

SPEAKER_07: maybe that's too many people i don't know i don't know yeah i i don't know what was going on there

SPEAKER_85: it seems like way too many people and you know it's as we watched in the we work documentary i think it's pretty accurate like you want the crazy guy on your team uh and until like the crazy person

SPEAKER_36: like goes too crazy right and it's a fine line you know you're pushing and pushing and pushing and there's you know like oh my god we hit 8.9 million square feet with the largest you know lease holder in manhattan and it's like okay largest bag holder in manhattan you own the

SPEAKER_29: mo did you just celebrate that you have the largest like debt in the in new york like that

Jason Calacanis: that's not something to be proud of necessarily it is a good it's a really good point about metrics like what is your what are your metrics and what is your store and why are you trying to hit it because

SPEAKER_40: if your north star is just size yeah the number of least square footage the number of least square footage what does that even mean that's just money on fire at some point you would be yeah it's like

SPEAKER_39: being like we've inventoried the most number of hamburgers we have the largest number of hamburgers in our walk-in box it's like how many you sell it should be how many how many square feet have you

SPEAKER_52: profitably resold that would be better exactly or what percentage of your leases is filled so if you had a 8.9 million square feet the percentage least would be you know percentage resold in their case you know occupied desk shares like you know the percentage utilized would be my north star metric there

SPEAKER_135: because that would be like super efficient right like right how efficiently are you running the business so when you take that lease how quickly do you get it filled yeah i'm not trying to blow up

SPEAKER_316: the biggest balloon in the world there's no reason for that no yeah uh okay let's do the startup of the

SPEAKER_52: day this is everybody's favorite segment we don't do it every day um but uh tell us what do we have today

Jason Calacanis: sort of the sometimes i love this i totally am going to call them after this and see if they're raising any money uh regent is building an electric sea glider i'm obsessed with seaplanes and this is a sea glider which is a regional commercial aircraft that flies low above the water it can go fast like a plane but then land in the water and then taxi to a city's ferry dock so kind of like a sea plane but it is sort of an alternate form of um transportation especially for like the succession people who are trying to like take a helicopter everywhere and all they need to do is just scoot

SPEAKER_153: across the water look at this thing wait a second so it it looks like a plane it looks like it glides

Jason Calacanis: on the top oh wait it does come up yeah it comes up and glides across the water like a fairy yeah so it could this is a rendering by the way that you're seeing on this video but it's like a foil and so what it would replace is fairies and water taxis it's just a fancy fairy but it's a wait a second it

SPEAKER_00: does fly right above the water uh-huh it's oh it comes out of the water completely oh it can fly oh look it's going over the gold gate bridge interesting so it flies less than 50 feet above the water

SPEAKER_83: yeah okay now i need to know if that is a safe thing to do from my aviation friends absolutely not

SPEAKER_329: um okay i'm like wait a second if you're flying don't you want to be like

SPEAKER_331: 5 000 feet above so if something goes wrong you have time but then you fall further but here it's

SPEAKER_11: no because it can glide above the water like it can it could you know even if there was like a it

SPEAKER_09: can operate i think the same 50 feet above the water and then if there's a rogue wave it could i'm

SPEAKER_00: sure it's terrible what if there's like a down draft and you smash into the water at what speed is it

SPEAKER_335: going i guess 180 miles an hour okay that's not that fast uh compared to a plane going three four

SPEAKER_86: or five hundred miles yeah i mean a jet's going 550 miles per hour 600 miles per hour it's just a

Jason Calacanis: high speed 350 i guess it's a high speed very okay that achieves lift it has 180 mile range holds 12 passengers this is why by the way this is why i'm the brand new vc who's like i want to invest in

SPEAKER_89: everyone and jason's like whoa whoa whoa careful that looks like a place to burn money i see red flags

Jason Calacanis: yeah exactly they have plans for their first commercial flight in 2025 and have orders from regional services like southern airways express the english channel ferry operator britney ferries and mesa airlines by leaving from boat docks the craft can save travelers time spent going to and

SPEAKER_75: from busy airports so if you just needed to zip across from paris to england like you could see it

SPEAKER_314: replacing the yeah channel thing okay so if you let me think of another route if we wanted to go to

SPEAKER_52: yeah and you also need to not if you're going 50 miles per hour you got to be careful you don't clip a boat 180 180 i'm sorry you want 180 50 feet above the water you got to be careful you don't clip

SPEAKER_112: something because ferries don't go that fast furries are going 40 miles an hour or something yeah right

Jason Calacanis: i wonder what regulations would apply at 50 feet is it an faa thing or is it a coast guard thing

SPEAKER_59: yes like you know how like when you have a fast moving boat you fall you get both i think you have

SPEAKER_52: the unique ability to get both but 180 mile range so if you i'm just thinking if you're going up and down a coast so if you left san francisco harbor and then decided to go you know i don't know santa cruz to the monterey well monterey is perfect trip that would be under 100 miles uh and so you're telling me you can do that in half an hour or you know an hour door to door that would be kind of cool to go

SPEAKER_92: to monterey at an hour from san francisco i guess it's about the same to draw a cool little sea plane

SPEAKER_33: uh now if you wanted to go all the way to la that'd be 300 miles and change that would not be a good

Jason Calacanis: way to do it i mean it might be quite beautiful right well it wouldn't make it you'd have to stop and either switch to a new one or charge up i guess it only goes 180 miles oh it's 180 miles per

SPEAKER_135: hour and 100 amr okay so this is for sydney harbor or maybe vancouver or something like that or the

SPEAKER_316: channel san diego maybe maybe it makes it yeah it is interesting because the the chat is pointing out

Jason Calacanis: that it doesn't replace a ferry either because it's only 12 people maybe it's just a sightseeing

SPEAKER_00: thing as a proof of uh proof of concept you know the mediterranean probably wouldn't allow you let to i mean go to italy to france or spain to france or as you go from the greek islands

SPEAKER_52: actually could be like santorini to you know whatever amalfi coast uh mykonos definitely amalfi

SPEAKER_00: i wonder but i wonder if they would let you actually do this but it does seem like this is from the tv

SPEAKER_11: social session not from rial it probably is it's for it i mean honestly though there's nothing wrong with

Jason Calacanis: targeting a small niche very wealthy audience right like if you're just saying okay this is replacing your helicopter and then if we're going to build up the range we're going to like make it go faster we're going to sort of come up with different use cases for it over time the ceo founded the company in 2020 billy billy talheimer previously worked on ev evtals um basically you know these electric uh planes in many cases vertical takeoff and landings vertical takeoff and landings at boeing's research division boeing bought aurora the company i think he was previously at which is not the self-driving truck trucking company and then uh this company the sea glider one it raised 18 million dollars co-led by teal capital jam fund and others

SPEAKER_112: uh these vitals are starting to also get traction i think these things are going to happen in the

David Friedberg: next 10 years and definitely they're they're because it's going over water there's just less

SPEAKER_36: people impacted by it i could see this working really well between the hawaiian islands like i'm

SPEAKER_39: not sure the exact distance between each one uh but you know those are you know little puddle jumper flights i could see this doing really well in cape cod area like going between nantucket and martha's vineyard and the cape and long island would be dope i mean short haul flights are the

Jason Calacanis: vast vast vast majority of flights i just talked to an electric airplane company that i'm super into and that's what they were saying it's like 70 70 to 80 percent of flights are like a sub two hours well so if you can figure out how to electrify the electrify those routes massive impact in terms of fuel usage sound like you know how quiet our electric cars are imagine if 70 to 80 percent of the takeoffs and landings at regional airports were effectively silent amazing that's going to

SPEAKER_135: be nice as well well this there's a company aviation um and they sold to cape air 75 electric

SPEAKER_52: planes and they're doing it this summer is my understanding these are test flights this summer

SPEAKER_95: and these are small these are real small right they're like i think it's probably six people maybe

SPEAKER_86: eight i'm not sure the exact number uh but we can pull it up here because uh we have producers who do this live i think it's like four or five million bucks per plane and they bought them or

SPEAKER_52: they put the order in so like it's actually i think this is actually happening um and it has a small number of people because yeah cape air is like little puddle jumpers and they're electric cape air is like

SPEAKER_86: they use probably cessna's or something like that and this new alice airplane if you go to the aviation website you'll see it it's actually flying um and it's a commuter air line if you pull up the website for aviation you'll see like a nice little looping video of it and it's pretty good looking uh and they're very short right so yeah it doesn't have a lot of weight but it looks like a little pilatus uh it's funky looking i think it's designed to be super uh aerodynamic so aerodynamic thank you and they have a commuter one it looks like four by four so probably eight people and then they have an executive one which is like six and yeah you just charge the batteries it is a

SPEAKER_83: fully ev i don't think it has any gas uh engines fully ev yeah i mean it's pretty dope when you

SPEAKER_386: think pretty dope like when we get there it's freaking fascinating yeah and it's so impact like so

Jason Calacanis: impactful in terms of pollution and sound like the fossil fuel impact is amazing but the pollution around airports the sound the fact that you like can't build houses there it restricts our ability to build regional airports because people don't want them in their towns and then as a result i don't know how often you fly to the middle of the country but like i do because my parents live there it can cost as much as going to europe to fly to the middle of the country because there just aren't airports and planes and part of the reason is because the infrastructure is unwanted expensive

SPEAKER_33: polluting loud etc etc yeah i think the uh other possibility is maybe um using jet fuel to get to 30 or 40 000 feet and then being able to use electric power for some portion because i think you need a

SPEAKER_52: lot of energy to get this weight in the air but once it's in the air to keep it going you might be able to do like you know a hybrid car kind of situation where there's for sure going to be hybrid opportunities

Jason Calacanis: yeah there's a lot of opportunity in the space and i think it's really interesting and it's and i sort of feel like i'm fine with the fact that this you know regent and its sea glider is like a little

SPEAKER_181: funky place to start because it's all about proving the technology i think over time yeah and the batteries

SPEAKER_52: as what we're seeing is really what happened with batteries for the mobile phone then impacting what happened for batteries for cars right because the original tesla battery pack was just like a bunch of cell phone batteries in a pack and then you'll go to aviation and home storage so everybody bought phones everybody wanted their phones to last longer all these scientists got super super geeked out and how to make smaller safer batteries remember they used to go on fire

SPEAKER_00: in laptops they made them safer and they made them cheaper and they made them at scale cars safer

SPEAKER_112: cheaper at scale yeah boom now planes that'll be the ultimate beneficiary and also eventually ships

Jason Calacanis: right like no reason a ship can't do this oh 100 electrifying shipping will be a game changer although you have to go across like most of the planet so that's going to be longer i think that's where like a hybrid solution really comes into play and it's so interesting that's why i like ryan peterson who'll

SPEAKER_52: be speaking at the oil and summit i like his uh you know give me a shipping container with solar panels on it that just drives itself across how dope would it be if like all of a sudden a shipping container

SPEAKER_159: like drives up the beach you know like in long island a truck comes drags into a depot it's got seaweed on it whatever they unpack it and then like the trucker just drives it like it's like a baby seal or something to the edge of montauk and it's like get out of here kid and like but i want to stay and the you know the trailer just like little ai trailer goes into the ocean it's like i want to stay no no you got to go back to shed shed it's like wali yeah and then this poor little shipping

SPEAKER_399: container has to go across the ocean it takes it a year because it goes so slow it's solar it's all

SPEAKER_29: lonely under their beach it makes friends with the whales and turtles yeah turtles living on top of it for a year and it just never has a home its home is on the road and it's just this this

SPEAKER_361: pixar film is writing itself right now i mean it really is beautiful i hope somebody's listening to

SPEAKER_86: this is like containers containers ships went away and the containers all became independent contractors it was like a new gig economy for the ai shipping containers and then some of them

SPEAKER_136: unionized so i was gonna say then they didn't like their working conditions because they keep getting attacked in the middle of the ocean who would beat up other shipping containers they surrounded pirates

Jason Calacanis: autonomous pirates our town shipping and pirates i mean if i were a computer i would definitely be like hmm the best way for me to reach maximum efficiency is to steal this guy's stuff just

SPEAKER_86: saying it is well it's also becoming a thing that did i just like these shipping containers sometimes have um you know they fall off of shipping we know they all fall these things fall off right

SPEAKER_00: because they're just throwing them on the top of a ship and like they don't tie them down i

SPEAKER_229: guess gravity keeps them on i'm like really is that how this works you just stack them like jenga cards

SPEAKER_29: like centrifugal force that's your plan yeah and but i i'm assuming they're locked down but sometimes i

SPEAKER_31: guess they just the ding tips they fall in well now what's happening is some number of those containers shipped to the bottom right they sink they're heavy other ones have some buoyancy in right this cardboard there might be something that's a little floaty and so they they stay on the top and then a small number of them kind of are just below the surface and so what's happening is ships are hitting containers

SPEAKER_00: that are slightly under the water you know or float up and down under the water above the water over time as they dry out or whatever and no idea and they rip the hulls off of ships so people have been

SPEAKER_86: losing their rudders and hulls by it's a freak accident but you can look it up online so some guy was doing one of these like cross-atlantic solo suicide missions you know people who like like you know

SPEAKER_00: what i'm not talk about self-harm coming uh trigger warning you know some people are like you know what i'd like to do is really risk my life in a way that makes no sense and i'm going to commit like

SPEAKER_418: a slow public suicide by going around the world alone or i'm going to accomplish this incredible thing through sheer force of will and training that's not what you're doing nope nope no no if

SPEAKER_31: you did that you'd have two people with you i'm talking about the solo people what's the difference if alex honnold scales you know el cap with no rope and there's somebody on the side with a rope

SPEAKER_00: it doesn't take away from his achievement like these i'm talking about these yokels who were like i'm going alone yeah no i know to go mad and eat your fingers okay great and so this guy got he

SPEAKER_86: thinks he lost his rudder from one of these instances because he just heard a big bang and then he has no

SPEAKER_52: rudder so he has no rudder so he has to put out uh those bags you know about those bags you can put behind a ship so there's a i don't know so much about this so you throw this thing off the back of your boat if it's got no rudder and it's a bag that sinks down below the water and then you just pull the rope and you can steer your chest here with this like bag it's like a nylon bag you throw in the back of your ship and you get a rudder it's pretty smart right it's for emergency situations so

SPEAKER_33: this guy had to like somehow navigate the globe with that all right everybody uh and then in uh

SPEAKER_39: uh minor news bloomberg's sources say zendesk is working with m and a advisor catalyst partners on a potential sale send us is trading at 15.7 billion up 6.3 percent generated 1.3 billion so it's trading at just over 10 times revenue wow uh on modest losses of 224 million so there's an easy

Jason Calacanis: buy for somebody mm-hmm interesting well yeah we'll keep an eye on that and then just so you know in the coming days of course there are going to be lots of tech earnings so just oh the tech

SPEAKER_430: earnings look out for us to get to geek out about tech earnings yeah well i mean it's actually it's a

SPEAKER_52: great way to see what's working right because the strategies announced last year the year before then we start actually seeing if those things are actually working also be interesting to see what's going on with the economy because my these these are going to be incredible earnings again we're

SPEAKER_162: going to see netflix meta tesla microsoft i mean it's going to be i think not that's not all this

Jason Calacanis: week maybe tesla might be this week anyway as in me i think the earnings are going to be sick here's

SPEAKER_85: my theory okay uh because we haven't hit the hard part yet no i think uh people working from home

SPEAKER_00: and being able to hire talent anywhere has added a dimension of efficiency to these companies

SPEAKER_52: that didn't exist before so if you needed some to hire somebody in some very particular thing and they had to work in one of seven offices and they weren't near that seventh off one of those seven or didn't want to relocate you didn't have that employee now hiring managers like okay yeah you're some ski bum you know and living in tahoe and you can do the work on your computer do it right so i think there's going to be unlocked efficiency because of remote work and then all that yolo money sitting around

SPEAKER_83: i think people are buying and consuming more than ever i mean clearly supply chain constraints would

SPEAKER_347: indicate that they are because it's not just constraints it's the fact that they bought so much

Jason Calacanis: stuff they can't even get here and get unloaded from ships and containers quickly enough tesla is tomorrow thanks that's going to be it's going to be fascinating i just think that no i mean the scale of

SPEAKER_86: the production i have no inside information obviously nobody does but um i mean this the number of cars i'm seeing in the scale of the production the number of people in my circle

SPEAKER_00: talking about should i get a y i'm upgrading my s do i want to go to the i mean i'm literally in multiple chats where people are upgrading their teslas this is the other thing i think tesla has

SPEAKER_86: done so well they make it so easy to buy a new car that i went to you know it's like i want to buy a car i was like uh i don't want to go through the car buying process i'll just wait for cybertruck

SPEAKER_18: i was like i i don't want to go through the car buying process i'll just wait for a cybertruck

Jason Calacanis: to i mean up here when i was ev shopping like it is just an absolute deal breaker at this point having gone through the tesla experience to interact with a dealer so the car i bought is the one i really loved the most and also though like maybe there was a hyundai that i could have tried but i did not want to deal with the dealer situation yes like they brought the car to me to drive and then i bought it on the internet and then they brought it to my house like it was very tesla-esque and like everybody once they copy that you'll sell a lot more cars anyway it's going to be fascinating but i also like there is a tech crunch i know we have to end we have a whole show but i'm curious to see related to tesla tech there's a tech crunch earnings preview where they say maybe we're going to get a glimpse into the part three of the company and the mission which is much more about the infrastructure the renewable energy part of it like i'm super excited to hear more about that too

Chamath Palihapitiya: uh i think the thing that's been hiding in plain sight is the factories materials in one side product

SPEAKER_39: out the other so this uh thing that elon's been talking about a lot and he talked about it at the

SPEAKER_36: gigafactory rodeo is can you have no suppliers and can materials come in one side and then a car come out the other without you having to be waiting for somebody who makes your screen or who makes your

SPEAKER_52: seats that kind of thing like how much of the car can one car company make because a lot of this has been these oems and basically you're as fast as your slowest most incompetent oem as a car manufacturer yes um outside equipment manufacturer so obviously you know there's somebody who does cigarette lighters for 99 of cars you know as one bad example there's somebody who does windshield wipers for 67 of car manufacturers they don't make their own windshield wipers i think what elon's been doing

SPEAKER_39: in these factories the dreadnoughts the factory is the project right yeah 100 what anything can come out of it right you just snap on why snap on cyber truck boom and you're done so yeah that's i can't

SPEAKER_162: wait to see it uh so interesting yeah we can't we can't wait to hear it was also they don't go too

SPEAKER_52: crazy i don't know if you remember that he was like i'm just telling employees to not work so hard don't

SPEAKER_86: go too crazy you know we want to build for quality and sustainability you know after we had all these near-deaths experience with the model three elon did tweet that which i thought was like either a sandbag or like you know okay yeah we don't have to burn ourselves out like let's just play for longevity here and consistency well there does have to yeah there's a strategy after uh there's a

Jason Calacanis: strategy after domination right like prove that you can create the first american car company since ford yeah and get cars on the road and create infrastructure for those be right like once you have proven the concept which is like near impossible to prove by the way like all all all i think i get mistaken for not giving elon enough credit for the fact that that is a phenomenal achievement that is an accomplishment that is like to also pair that with a spaceship company like a rocket ship company that's actually sending people unparalleled accomplishment in human history or american

SPEAKER_43: history well once you do that he figures out which only figures out self-driving you know that's going

Jason Calacanis: to be the next one i mean wait till he figures out actual electrification like wait until those cars have you know bi-directional charging and they can power your house because you've got the panels and the battery and like i mean there's so much phenomenal potential there anyway but you i think it is really i think it's great that he's like don't burn out because you now it's like you got to build forever

SPEAKER_85: yeah i mean the fact the size of that factory i'm just i've never seen anything at that scale in my

SPEAKER_52: life it was like going into an alien building and being like yeah this is how like the engineers you know made humanity like it feels like it has its own weather imagine what's that is it what's

Jason Calacanis: there there's like a michael creighton book where he goes in a building that's so big that it has its

SPEAKER_411: own weather uh oh really that makes sense yeah that looks like one that might this thing is like good

SPEAKER_07: lord look at that it's like a mile long i mean this is the thing about moving to texas like you could

SPEAKER_52: never build this in california you'd still be in planning like and he built it in under two years there i think yeah like it it's insane what was the what was the groundbreaking date on gigafactory four million square feet it's got so many square feet like i think only a third of it's being used at the start so this thing has the ability to like you know have a lot more stuff going on in it the

SPEAKER_86: scale is just insane and it was built in you know a couple of years i mean it's pretty extraordinary

SPEAKER_222: how big this thing is august 12th 2020 this is the one in delval wow that's nuts that's nuts bonkers

SPEAKER_471: hey everyone producer nick here i want to tell you about the sas syndicate if you're a founder of a sas company with a product and market our investment team wants to talk to you head over to the syndicate dot com slash sas s-a-a-s to apply to raise from the sas syndicate and you can join jason syndicate of over 9 000 accredited investors at the syndicate dot com producer justin here no cool startup check

SPEAKER_473: out open scouting dot com where anyone can refer a startup to our investment team here at launch even if you don't know the founder if you're the first to flag a company for us and we decide to invest you'll get 5k in cash or 10 of our carry hey everybody producer rachel here are you an early

SPEAKER_478: stage startup that has product and market some traction and are looking to raise at least five hundred thousand dollars apply today to remote demo day for your chance to pitch to over 9 000 investors in jason syndicate submit your application at remote demo day dot com our next event is on april

SPEAKER_471: 27th and if you want to learn how to invest in startups from the world's greatest angel investor and no we're not talking about chris sacca then head to angel dot university to apply the four-hour workshop costs three hundred dollars and all proceeds are donated to charity to date we've donated over a hundred and seventy five thousand dollars to various charities and you can see the full list at angel dot university slash charity